AquaFusionNet: Lightweight VisionSensor Fusion Framework for Real-Time Pathogen Detection and Water Quality Anomaly Prediction on Edge Devices

Evidence from many low and middle income regions shows that microbial contamination in small scale drinking water systems often fluctuates rapidly, yet existing monitoring tools capture only fragments of this behaviour. Microscopic imaging provides organism level visibility, whereas physicochemical sensors reveal shortterm changes in water chemistry; in practice, operators must interpret these streams separately, making realtime decision-making unreliable. This study introduces AquaFusionNet, a lightweight cross-modal framework that unifies both information sources inside a single edge deployable model. Unlike prior work that treats microscopic detection and water quality prediction as independent tasks, AquaFusionNet learns the statistical dependencies between microbial appearance and concurrent sensor dynamics through a gated crossattention mechanism designed specifically for lowpower hardware. The framework is trained on AquaMicro12K, a new dataset comprising 12,846 annotated 1000 micrographs curated for drinking water contexts, an area where publicly accessible microscopic datasets are scarce. Deployed for six months across seven facilities in East Java, Indonesia, the system processed 1.84 million frames and consistently detected contamination events with 94.8% mAP@0.5 and 96.3% anomaly prediction accuracy, while operating at 4.8 W on a Jetson Nano. Comparative experiments against representative lightweight detectors show that AquaFusionNet provides higher accuracy at comparable or lower power, and field results indicate that cross-modal coupling reduces common failure modes of unimodal detectors, particularly under fouling, turbidity spikes, and inconsistent illumination. All models, data, and hardware designs are released openly to facilitate replication and adaptation in decentralized water safety infrastructures.